by Lucy Francis
He put in a token appearance at his parents’ house when his mother held a dinner party for friends newly returned from a three-year work contract in Japan. Though the fine lines tightening around Mother’s mouth spoke her disapproval, she at least didn’t verbally chide him for arriving dateless and leaving far too early.
He watched Danny’s schedule like a hawk, checking on him in the evenings to make sure everything was going okay. He caught himself thinking about Andri, wondering how the job hunt was going, or when she’d get her apartment keys for sure and be ready to move. He’d promised to help her move, and he’d be there, no matter what. But the frustration with her flippant advice to leave his brother to his own devices still simmered in his chest.
It should be better this way, leaving her friendship behind. He’d searched for something about her that would kill his attraction, and he’d found it. It didn’t really help, though. There should have been some relief when he walked away from her. Instead, he had twinges of guilt over hurting her and bursts of desire tugging at him when she crossed his thoughts. Shouldn’t he have stopped thinking about her by now?
Travis walked into the office early the next Tuesday and found Rachel pacing in front of his desk. “Hi.”
She rounded on him. “You’re such an ass.”
He hated it when Rachel went on the rampage. “What did I do?”
Rachel planted her feet, hands on her hips, and pinned him with a dark look he knew all too well. Ah. She talked to Andri. “Rach, don’t give me that look.”
“I racked my brains to see if there was some reason that you might deserve a nugget of my excellent advice. About the only thing I came up with is that I don’t recall paying you back for that time at the park the summer after sixth grade when Joe Carlton poured a bucket of sand on my head and you tossed him in the nearest dumpster. So to pay off that debt, listen up. Andri is sweet and genuine and thoughtful and she doesn’t usually stick her nose in other people’s business. When someone like that offers you advice, maybe you should ask why.”
Frustration surged inside him. Naturally Rachel would defend her friend, but he’d known Rachel far longer. Shouldn’t she be on his side? “I know why. She was trying to help.”
“Yeah, she was.” Rachel stepped forward, nearly nose to nose with him, and poked him in the chest to punctuate her words. “Ask. Her. Why.”
A sick feeling bloomed in his gut. He’d missed something important, or she wouldn’t be busting his balls like this. “Talk to me, Rach.”
She flipped him the bird and stalked out of his office. She’d clearly given him all the help she intended to, and with the anger vibrating through her frame, it was probably more help than he deserved.
Damn it all. He utterly despised the embarrassment and regret that followed letting his temper get the best of him. And now he needed to apologize to Andri. He’d obviously wronged her, and his honor would hold his feet to the fire until he made things right.
He dreaded facing Andri again, when his attraction hadn’t faded enough. Hell, it hadn’t faded at all. He’d spotted a woman walking down the street as he drove yesterday. The only similarity was her long, wavy brown hair, but he thought about how thick and silky Andri’s hair was, and he thought about kissing her in his truck, and that little whimper of hers and in no time flat, he was suffering a raging hard-on.
He dropped into the chair behind his desk and drew a deep breath to settle the pounding of his heart. He wiped his damp palms on his pants. He missed her so much, on so many levels. Her company. Her friendship. She was fun to spend time with, and fun had been seriously lacking in his life since he walked out on her.
Dammit, he wanted to spend time with her, kiss her, make love to her— Whoa, he had to back down from that one. That brought him to his sense of reason. He didn’t want to get hurt. He didn’t want to hurt her. But, of course, he had already, hadn’t he?
He had to see her again and try to make things right. If he didn’t apologize, he’d never hear the end of it from Rachel. There were other electricians, but few lifelong friends. Rachel asked very little of him over the years, but she had asked this. He refused to let down his sister from another mother.
Unfortunately, work conspired against him, and he didn’t get the chance to so much as think about apologizing again until two days later, when a text he’d asked Ian to send hit his phone.
Ian: Moving day for A tomorrow. Starts @ noon.
He sent a quick note of thanks back. No matter if they were on speaking terms or not, whether the apology went well or not, he’d be there. His inner Boy Scout would never let him live it down if he failed to show up.
When he arrived at Rachel and Ian’s house, the work van had been cleaned out and loaded to the brim. He backed his truck into the driveway. Rachel closed the van doors and raised an eyebrow at him.
“I promised.”
Rachel gave him a slight nod of approval. “Good. Get to work.”
He lowered the tailgate on the truck, and as he turned toward the garage, he caught sight of Andri through the living room window. She was on the phone, pacing, and by the stressed expression on her face, it wasn’t a good conversation. His heart twinged a little at the sight of her. She’d upset him, but that didn’t mean he liked seeing her distressed.
He and Ian loaded a floral print sofa and a disassembled platform bed into his truck before Andri came out of the house, twisting her hair into a ponytail. Her eyes were tinged with red, and the strength of the instant rage to punish whoever made her cry shocked him.
She glanced up at him and managed a weak smile, merely a shadow of the one that had captured him the first day. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I did.”
Before he could ask about the phone call, Rachel said, “Maybe you should change your number and not tell your mother.”
Andri laughed a little, waving the suggestion away with one hand. “Sometimes I forget that listening to her when she gets on a tear is optional. But if I cut her off too soon, she really gets annoyed, and then I get all sorts of crazy voice mails and she calls to pester Dmitri.”
“You can’t get a word in edgewise anyway,” Rachel said, picking up a smaller box and heading for Andri’s car. “Just set the phone down somewhere and leave the room. She can rant all she wants and you don’t have to hear it.”
Travis didn’t get another chance to talk to Andri through the rest of the move, other than asking directions on where she wanted certain things at the apartment. He was a little surprised that the four of them managed to do the move, including getting the heavy, bulky furniture up to the second floor.
Afterward, Andri offered pizza as a reward, but Ian and Rachel begged off, each claiming other plans for the evening. One look at Rachel told Travis it was a lie, but it would give him a chance to make his apology without an audience, and for that, he was grateful.
When the Garrett siblings left, Travis found Andri standing in the open doorway of her apartment. She watched him approach, her expression unreadable as she stood back and waved him in.
He stood in the entry, glanced into the living room. She’d already pulled out her laptop, which sat on a small glass end table, a notebook beside it and sticky notes on the edges of the screen. “Notes for the job hunt?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, I owe you dinner for helping me move, but unless you feel like a Mickey-D’s run, then it will have to wait.” Her tone was cool, tired, matching the expression in her eyes. She reached up a hand to massage one of her shoulders, and he forced back the flash of desire to rub the kinks out of her muscles for her.
He leaned back against the door. “I didn’t stay because you owe me food. I wanted to apologize.”
Her brows lifted. “Okay.”
“I bit your head off the last time we talked, and it was uncalled for. I know you meant to help.”
Andri watched him, clearly waiting for more. Okay, so maybe he did need to offer more than a simple apology.
He
shifted and swallowed hard. His ability to walk away from her had fled, so he reached for the words to try to smooth their friendship out. “I could blame it on being stressed out of my damn mind, or being sensitive about my efforts to help Danny, or whatever, but I won’t. There’s really no excuse for my behavior. I had no right to take anything out on you. I acted like an ass, and I’m really sorry.”
She appraised him for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Nicely done.”
He couldn’t resist her. After an afternoon working near Andri, catching her inviting scent as he moved her belongings, the way the sleeveless blue top and shorts she wore hugged her curves, thoroughly imprinting his brain, his resistance had fled completely. He never wanted to do anything to take her smile away again, and he desperately needed to see it now. He glanced again at the sofa, ignoring the wisp of a dream that popped into his head. A dream where he’d found a number of ways to make her smile, to fill her with pleasure. Nope. Not going there. “Mind if we sit?”
Andri waved her fingers at him to follow as she walked over to the sofa. She sat, pulling one leg beneath her. Travis joined her, taking care not to position himself too close. She’d let him off the hook a little too easily, though maybe that was payment for helping with the move. Rachel would have kicked his ass and then called it good. Melody would have left him in the doghouse for weeks.
She pushed her dark, wavy hair back over her shoulder, a movement that filled him with a sharp craving for the silky feel of her hair in his hands, tangling his fingers through the thick strands— Travis jerked his wandering thoughts back to the moment and focused.
Andri said, “Travis, I understand why you went off like you did, but you’ve owned it, and I appreciate that.”
That was it? “So…apology accepted?”
She nodded. “While we’re at it, I’ll apologize too. Not for what I said, because it needed saying. But I am sorry for the effect it had. I know it hurt you. You already feel awful. I didn’t want to add to it.”
Her advice had stung, abraded his pride, and undercut everything he’d been working so hard to accomplish with Danny. “You definitely said things I didn’t want to hear. But, just because I don’t like something doesn’t automatically make it wrong.”
She tilted her head slightly, her gaze holding his. “I speak from experience, you know.”
His confrontation with Rachel burst into his thoughts. Ask. Her. Why. The pieces clicked into place. Of course. Why would she tackle a sensitive and difficult subject to give him advice unless she had some experience to back her up? Wow, he really was clueless. “Now that my brain is engaging instead of my emotions, I think I get it. You really do understand, don’t you?”
A slight, sad smile crossed her lips. “Yes, I really do.”
“Who?”
“My mother. She’s an alcoholic.”
His angry words came back to him. You don’t have any idea what it’s like. Another thought overlapped the first, the memory of her reddened eyes, her sadness earlier, after talking with her mother. Oh, yeah. She did know what it was like. Damn, he was an ass. “You know what I’m going through.”
“The dynamic is different, but yes. My dad did all the heavy lifting as Dmitri and I grew up. My mom was always a bit of a diva, and even now she swings from lively and happy to a screaming, crying terror. It was much, much worse when she drank. Dad protected us from the worst of it. But I spent my whole life watching him try everything to fix her. He argued, he ordered, he bribed, he begged. He tried to sweet-talk her into doing the right thing. He’d threaten to leave her until she clung to his leg and begged him to stay.”
As hard as it was to watch his brother wallow in addiction over the years, he could only imagine the desperation he’d feel to fix a wife or a parent. “Is she sober now?”
“Yes. She finally got help a couple of years ago.”
“Your dad never saw her whole.”
A fresh wash of tears flooded her eyes, but she blinked hard and pushed them back. “No. And it cost him so much. Dmitri and I spent a lot of time at a support group when we were teenagers, and it was the only thing that kept us from being dragged under by the weight of Ma’s problems. Dad never understood that he had to take care of himself until it was too late.”
He glanced around her apartment, not really looking, but needing to free himself from her gaze, her intensity. “I can’t let Danny fall, Andri. My parents have already given up, so without me, he’s on his own.”
“Have they given up? Or have they realized that they’re collateral damage if they don’t save themselves from his ruin and wreckage?”
That snapped his attention back to her. Was that what his dad had done? Pulled himself out of harm’s way? For a moment, his thoughts whirled. What would that be like, to let go, to live each day without a rock of terrible speculation in his stomach, wondering what trouble his brother would find next? The allure of self-preservation beckoned to him, but his sense of honor and duty thickened around his battered heart.
She leaned forward, placed her cool hand over his where it rested on his thigh, and his heart jumped a little. He’d missed her touch. “Travis, you can offer support. Love him, unconditionally. But the rest has to be up to him. You can’t do it for him. And it’s painfully clear that you’re trying to.”
“My dad told me something very similar a few weeks ago.” He sighed and drummed the fingers of his free hand against the arm of the sofa. He sat silent for a moment, relishing the sense of comfort he often felt in her company. He focused on the softness of her skin against his as she stroked his wrist with the pad of her thumb, all his nerve endings on high alert for more of her touch.
Then his thoughts tumbled past his lips before he could stop them. “I’m not sure I know how to stop fighting his addiction for him.” For a sharp moment, he desperately wanted to stop, to just let go. But what kind of brother did that make him?
Andri pulled him back to her with a squeeze of her hand. “You’ve been doing this a long time?”
“Not long enough. I took good care of him for a while when he was young.” After Jacob died, Travis had taken his responsibility seriously. He’d tried so hard to shield his little brother from everything painful and sad in life. But once he’d entered middle school, he’d avoided carrying the weight of Danny’s happiness. It was too much, and he’d wanted freedom.
Though he’d hidden that part of himself all these years, he couldn’t resist the urge to release this particular failing into her care. Somehow, he thought Andri would understand this, too. “When I got older, I stopped letting him hang out with me and my friends because he was my lame little brother and he’d get in the way of having fun. By the time I was seventeen or so, I realized that he needed me. I started trying to protect him. I think he was struggling with depression, even then. He tried to be bigger than life, always out doing crazy skateboard tricks, getting in trouble with his buddies, stuff like that. I thought he was acting out because he wanted attention from our mother, but maybe there was more to it.”
“He’s still battling depression?”
“Yes. He doesn’t like the meds, though, so I think he self-medicates in his own way. It doesn’t make sense to me, but, there it is.” He turned his hand under hers, catching her fingers, threading their hands together. “Are we still friends?”
He half expected her to say no, but she smiled, cutting a path through the darkness shrouding him. “Of course.”
God, he really loved that smile. “Then I think you should let me take you out tomorrow. Maybe give me a chance to prove to you that I really am a nice guy.”
She laughed. “Travis, I know you’re a nice guy.”
The compliment flowed easily from her lips, but it warmed his heart anyway.
Chapter Eight
In her nearly month long job search, Andri scored five job interviews, three of which turned her down because she was overqualified. Two invited her back for a second interview, and one a third, but no job offer yet.
/>
She saw Travis every day after she moved into her apartment. They met for lunch or dinner. They caught a couple of movies, hiked, explored the aviary and the zoo. Sometimes she tagged along while he ran errands. He wasn’t a fly fisher, which she was willing to temporarily overlook, but they did get out on the water, spending an evening at the reservoir with a few of Rachel’s friends. They attended one night of the Pioneer Day rodeo to cheer on a bull-riding cousin of his. Throughout it all, she found herself growing closer and closer to him, though she reminded herself constantly they were just friends, that they had fun together, nothing more.
She and Travis exchanged texts often. Usually goofy things, but she enjoyed them. On a Friday night near the end of the month, he sent a text.
Travis: Pick you up at 7 tomorrow night? We’ll be fashionably late.
Tomorrow night? What did they have planned—
“Oh, no.” She’d forgotten his mother’s fundraiser event. She dashed off a quick message, lying through her teeth. Sounds great, looking forward to it.
She didn’t bother to look in her closet. She’d attended a couple of formal events with Peter, but once they broke up, the dresses and the pathetic memories they held went to Goodwill. Not that having them now would have helped. The extra three inches on her hips meant they wouldn’t have fit anymore. She sent an SOS to Rachel. HELP. Holt fundraiser tomorrow, formal, nothing to wear.
She paced for five minutes, waiting for a reply, nearly ready to call instead when the response came.
Rachel: Relax, off work by 10, call u then 4 shopping.
The next day, after four stops, Andri found herself in a boutique that held some promise. There was no time for alterations, so finding a dress that looked good and didn’t drag on the ground unless she wore platform stilettos proved to be a challenge.
A blue gown Rachel found had promise, but lost out the moment the saleswoman presented a pale green silk one. The one-shoulder Grecian style made Rachel laugh at the stereotype, but Andri loved it. After finding some gorgeous low-heeled strappy shoes and a new clutch at yet another store, Rachel followed her home to help her get ready. She’d rarely seen Rachel made up, but the woman was talented with a makeup brush, leaving her with smoky eyes, just a hint of color across her cheekbones, and a really fabulous bronzed lipcolor. Andri drew her thick hair into a loose twist. Magic, Rachel assured her before she left. Not that it mattered, when her date was just a friend.
